The Future of Water
Making predictions is very difficult, especially about the future.
—Casey Stengel, famous philosopher (and Major League Baseball legend)
It is one thing to find fault with an existing system. It is another thing altogether, a more difficult task, to replace it with another approach that is better.
—Nelson Mandela, speaking of water resource management1
THE WORLD’S rapidly growing dependence on expensive, commercial bottled water is a symptom of the fundamental failure to provide safe and affordable drinking water to everyone on the planet—which should be a basic human right. Those of us who live in the richer nations of the world are buying more and more bottled water because we increasingly fear or dislike our tap water, we distrust governments to regulate, monitor, and protect public water systems adequately, we can’t find public fountains anywhere anymore, we are convinced by advertisers and marketers that bottled water will make us healthier, thinner, or stronger, and we’re told that it is just another benign consumer “choice.” If we let our tap water systems decay, however, soon bottled water won’t be a choice—it will be a necessity, as it is already is in countries without safe tap water.
At the same time, the growing revolution against bottled water is public recognition that safe and affordable water for all, under public control and protection, is a goal worth fighting for. Our relationship to water must change; indeed, it is changing already. We are in the midst of a critical transition and the path we choose in the next few years will determine whether we move toward a world of safe, expensive water for the privileged and wealthy in the form of bottled water or private water systems, or toward more comprehensive safe water for all.
This is not the first such transition. Humanity’s approach to dealing with fresh water has evolved over the eons, through two distinct Ages of Water. I believe we are in the midst of a transition to a third approach, one that is fundamentally new. The First Water Age began when Homo sapiens emerged from the mists of evolution as thinking beings and began the transition from primitive hunter/gatherer societies. During this age, water was simply taken when needed and available. The natural hydrologic cycle of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff all worked to purify water, and the rivers, streams, lakes, and springs fed by rain were usually safe to drink. If the water was too dirty, early humans got sick and died. But life, as Thomas Hobbes observed, was already nasty, brutish, and short.
The Second Water Age began when humans started to organize into more formal fixed communities and to outgrow the limits of local water resources. During this age, we see the first intentional manipulation of the hydrologic cycle. And we see it everywhere in the archeological record, especially in arid, desert regions. It is no accident that many of the greatest early civilizations arose on the banks of perennial rivers, like the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, Yellow, Colorado, Nile, and Jordan. Where there was water, there was life. And where there were growing communities, there was the need to develop water-management systems and institutions. Ancient civilizations left behind traces of irrigation canals, early dams to store or divert water, aqueducts and acequias that move water tens and even hundreds of kilometers with only the force of gravity, and the earliest wastewater systems to separate good water from bad. These early cultures also gave us the first laws and social structures for managing water. The Code of Hammurabi, written by the great early king of ancient Babylon over 3,000 years ago, lays out some of the first laws and rules governing the rational and fair management of precious irrigation water and the maintenance of water systems, including punishments for water theft.
The Second Water Age reached full flower in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when societies began to master the natural hydrologic cycle in order to provide clean water and to recycle our wastes using chemical, mechanical, biological, and institutional tools that mimic and amplify nature’s power. The Second Water Age is characterized by massive physical interventions in the natural hydrologic cycle. We built huge dams to capture water in wet periods to use in dry periods, and systems of canals and aqueducts to move water thousands of kilometers from wet regions to dry regions. Our cities rely on complex systems of pumps, treatment plants, distribution pipelines, wastewater collection systems, and waste-treatment plants. If these systems were to fail, our cities would fail as well.
All of our engineered water-treatment processes that flocculate, coagulate, precipitate, condense, and distill water are mechanical imitations of natural processes. We build massive sand or charcoal or mechanical filters that mimic the purification role played by soils. We run water through reverse-osmosis membranes that imitate the way cell walls separate salts from solution. We pass water under high-intensity ultraviolet lamps that replicate the purifying effects of the sun. We grow vats of naturally occurring waste-eating bacteria that take the biological products we excrete and consume them, producing fertilizer, oxygen, and energy. We use fossil fuels to distill water in massive boilers and condensers that are concentrated mechanical reproductions of the hydrologic cycle. And all of these artificial interventions are necessary because the population of the planet has outgrown the ability of nature to provide adequate water for our needs and to purify our wastes.
We are now, I believe, at the beginning of another transition, this time to the Third Water Age. The Second Age brought enormous benefits to us, but has ultimately proven inadequate to the growing need. Billions of people still suffer unnecessary water-related diseases because they lack safe water and sanitation. Aquatic ecosystems are dying due to our use, diversion, and contamination of the fresh water they too need to survive. The risks of political, economic, and military conflicts over water resources are growing. Climate change is already starting to alter basic hydrological conditions around the world. And the technological “hard path” fixes we applied in the Second Water Age seem less and less likely to solve these problems by themselves. The growing use of bottled water is evidence that the old ways of managing water challenges are putting us on the wrong side of history.
We must do more than just “more of the same” if we are going to truly address global water problems. We must make the transition to the Third Water Age by following a more sustainable approach that recognizes the realities of a renewable but ultimately limited resource. This approach is what I have called the “soft path for water.”2 The soft path for water is a comprehensive approach to sustainable water use and management that takes advantage of the remarkable engineering skills and technologies available for managing water but also looks to tools like the proper application of economics, innovative incentives for efficient water use, appropriate regulatory approaches for protecting water quality and ecosystem health, and expanded public participation in decision-making.
A key objective of the soft path is to meet the water-related needs of people and businesses, rather than merely supplying water. The use of water must be considered a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. People want to be clean or to clean their clothes or produce food and other goods and services using convenient, cost-effective, and socially acceptable means. They don’t have an ideological preference, or shouldn’t, for how much water is used, and in many cases may not care whether water is used at all. If there are ways to reduce the demand for water while continuing to provide these goods and services, overall pressures on the world’s water supply will fall.
The soft path also requires that we match the quality of water needed with the quality that is available. Higher-quality water should be reserved for those uses that require higher quality. The soft path recognizes that ecological health and the activities that depend on it (e.g., fishing, swimming, tourism, delivery of clean raw water to downstream users) are fundamental, not peripheral, to water management. The soft path recognizes the complexity of water economics, including the power of economies of scale and scope and recognizes that investments in small-scale, decentralized solutions can be just as cost-effective as investments in large, centralized options. Finally, the soft path requires water providers to interact closely with water users and to effectively engage community groups in water management. These ideas contrast and conflict with the fundamental assumptions of the Second Water Age that water left in a river or lake or aquifer is not being used productively, and that large-scale central water infrastructure is the only realistic way to meet demands.
Bottled water is a consequence of the failure of the “hard path,” and the growing backlash against it is a symptom of the need for a new paradigm. If everyone on the planet had access to affordable safe tap water, bottled water use would be seen as unnecessary. If government regulatory agencies actually worked to protect the public from poor-quality water, false advertising, misleading marketing, and blatant hucksterism, sales of magic water elixirs would be halted. If public sources of drinking water were more accessible, arguments about the convenience of bottled water would seem silly. And if bottled water companies had to incorporate the true economic and environmental costs of the production and disposal of plastic bottles, as well as the extraction and use of sensitive groundwater, into the price of their product, sales would plummet.
Machiavellian motives can be inferred from the dramatic expansion of bottled water in the last decade: Some claim that it is an orchestrated effort to privatize precious water resources and to turn water from a natural right into a luxury, a commercial product. Certainly, the bottled water industry is successfully capitalizing on, and profiting from, the decay of our comprehensive safe drinking water systems, or, in the poorer countries of the world, their complete absence. But motives aside, society must not abandon municipal systems, or let the rich fall back on individual point-of-use systems that purify water just for those who can afford it, or try to provide everyone with bottled water for their potable water needs. The answer is to continue to build new and innovative water and wastewater systems, expand and maintain the remarkable water systems we’ve already built, get the failing pipes and lead contamination out of old buildings, and learn to manage water for the long-term future, not the next quarterly earnings period.
Pursuing these goals won’t eliminate the bottled water industry. Consumers will always seek a diversity of choices, including the choice to buy water in convenient, single-serve containers. But the bottled water industry itself is in need of serious reform and comprehensive regulation in order to safeguard human health, reduce the environmental impacts of bottling and transporting water, and protect the public from misrepresentations and lies about unproven health benefits of bottled water.
Let me offer two simple but diametrically opposed visions of the future.
In the first vision, the poorest parts of the world never get the high-quality reliable water systems developed in Europe and the United States, and even these water systems are allowed to decay to the point where no one trusts the quality of tap water for drinking. In this vision, the quality of the water from our faucets deteriorates, and safe drinking water is increasingly available only in fancy and expensive bottled water and individual point-of-use systems for the rich. Water is privatized, commoditized, and controlled for those who can afford it, and bottled water sales expand everywhere, for the demand is high. Billions of poor are left to rely on drinking water from private vendors, poorly run and regulated municipal systems, dubious tap water, water bottlers, or contaminated local sources. Cholera, dysentery, and typhoid resurge in the slums and under-served cities of the world. Scarcity and contamination continue to expand, ecosystems lose more and more of the water they need to survive, and inequities and conflicts over water worsen. No doubt many readers already recognize all this as a vision of much of the world as it already is for billions. And it is a vision of where the United States is heading if the philosophies of anti-tax, anti-government, and anti-regulation are allowed to continue to cripple municipal infrastructure of all kinds and weaken government enforcement of water-quality protections. The front-page news in September 2009 that drinking water standards in many parts of the United States have not been adequately monitored or enforced was only news to those who haven’t been paying attention.
But there is good news as well, enough to suggest an alternative vision of the future. In this second vision, the world moves toward sustainably managed freshwater resources, where every person on the planet has safe and reliable drinking water, ecosystems and communities all have their basic water needs satisfied, and water is used efficiently and carefully. Water-related diseases, conquered in the richer nations a hundred years ago, are conquered for all. Water quality is protected and water-quality laws are strengthened and enforced for all. Aquatic ecosystems around the world are restored and once again provide natural water purification services. And conflicts over water are resolved with negotiation, discussion, and public debate. In this second vision, bottled water doesn’t disappear, but it once again becomes what it used to be—a luxury bought and consumed only for reasons of pretention, style, and occasional convenience, or as a short-term solution for emergencies when other safe alternatives are not available.
I believe this second vision is inevitable—that we will sooner or later have no choice but to solve our water problems. We’re already moving toward the soft path, but we have a long way to go, and we may take many missteps along the way. If we’re to have a chance of making the journey successfully, five serious reforms of the water industry are needed:
♦ Support and expand state-of-the-art tap water systems. Towns and cities must continue to invest in building and operating the best municipal tap water systems that technology and money can produce. Bottled water, like any product, can only thrive when there isn’t a better alternative. We must make sure there always is. The technology exists to provide inexpensive water of the highest purity. We can still pursue a future where all municipal water systems operate the best water-purification systems available with consistent, independent, and reliable water-quality testing. Old distribution systems, which often add contaminants or poor taste to tap water, must be upgraded and replaced, including all old plumbing connections that leach lead or other contaminants into otherwise safe water. Public water fountains can be restored, and modern “hydration stations” with modern filters and regular maintenance can be installed widely, to provide safe and free water in our schools, parks, and other public spaces.
♦ Develop, pass, and enforce smarter water regulations. New water-quality regulations must be enacted and vigorously enforced to close the massive loopholes that permit bottlers to meet different standards than those in place for tap water. In the United States, there should be a complete overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration, which seems uninterested, unwilling, or unable to adequately enforce and monitor bottled water quality. If this is not possible, the responsibility for regulating bottled water must be taken away from the FDA and given to an agency that will do the job. No matter which agency is responsible, the same water-quality standards and testing and reporting requirements should be applied to both bottled water and tap water. All water-quality standards must be upgraded, testing rules for both bottled water and tap water must be tightened, tests must be done by completely independent laboratories, and all results must be promptly and publicly reported.
♦ Require truthful labeling. Labeling of all bottled water must identify the source of the water, the mineral content, the processes used to purify the water, the name, location, and phone number of the bottler, and information on where up-to-date water-quality test results can be found. This same information must also be posted on websites for each water bottler. The current FDA nutrition label, which hides far more than it reveals, should not be used for bottled water. Regulations to require truth in branding and labeling should be strengthened and enforced.
♦ Protect consumers from fraud and misrepresentations. Government agencies responsible for protecting consumers against fraudulent and misleading advertising and marketing must actually work to protect consumers. In the United States, this means that the FTC and the FDA must aggressively move against the twenty-first-century snake-oil salesmen and medicine-show hucksters who are misleading the public about the potential of some bottled waters to cure their medical ills, help them lose weight, or otherwise magically solve their problems. This will require far more serious efforts to crack down on advertising fraud, especially on the Internet.
♦ Reduce bottled water’s environmental impact. The environmental consequences of producing and using bottled water can be minimized by reducing the energy costs associated with making and transporting bottled water and by aggressively dealing with plastic waste. I urge people to adopt a “drink local” philosophy to match the growing movement to “eat local.” Drinking imported bottled water is especially costly to consumers and the environment because of the massive energy costs of moving water from one place to another. Bottlers must be required to substantially boost the recycled plastic content of their bottles. The industry must stop describing plastic bottles as “recyclable” as though that were the end of their responsibility, and they should support comprehensive efforts to actually recycle plastic bottles. All of them. Recycling programs should be expanded with the target of capturing and reusing 100 percent of PET and other recyclable plastics.
In the end, the debate about bottled water is really a debate about the value of water, human rights versus responsibilities, environmental priorities and protection, economic markets versus public goods, government intervention versus government reform, and more. If we are thoughtful, however, we will see bottled water for what it is—the result of a failure to provide satisfactory public water systems and services for everyone—and realize that our obsession with bottled water can be overcome if we address the reasons people seek it out.
Now I think I’ll go get a glass of tap water.